23 comments:

Wow, Hulkdk doesn't seem to understand what a labor union is. He seems to think it's about price-fixing and market monopolies? That's really, really stretching the concept of 'collective bargaining'. Instead of getting workers an extra dollar an hour along with dental and vision benefits, his union would make the business owners more rich!

Reading MOTW is always a pleasure.I find it funny how ignorant people can be.Keep up being moronic slackers people! Make me laugh some more.On a serious note, the people who state that other goblins are "ruining the economy" are just full of themselves and their ideals. Especially on wow, it's a free market, and you can post items for any price you choose.

Am I the only one who frequents this blog that finds selling arrows in stacks of 100 to be dishonest to the point of abuse.

How can someone be proud of deliberately ripping someone off?

I completely understand the idea of 'buyer beware' and taking advantage of the stupidity and lack of attention of others and I wouldn't hesitate to take full advantage of a mistake that they've made in selling an item. I also have no problem whatsoever attaching a 'stupid tax' to items of questionable work, like fresh milk during the holidays.

But I personally draw the line at deliberately going out of your way to rip someone off. This is akin to selling a car at the dealership and then rolling it up to the front door with no tires, and no keys, putting on a big shit-eating grin and saying "Alright, now, if you want the keys and tires, that'll be another $1000 please".

I don't have any strong feeling about this myself, but ultimately it is actually taking advantage of their inattention; it is not a bait-and-switch, it is "here is a product that is obviously overpriced for the amount I'm selling it for" and then people buy it.

@Kirzen: There's absolutely nothing wrong with posting things at abnormal stack sizes - we're perfectly free to post them in increasing stack sizes following the Fibonacci sequence if we so choose. If someone decides to buy them at abnormal stack sizes, that's their own problem. If they also don't have an addon to sort things by buyout price, well, sucks to be them. The problem isn't that people are exploiting the idiocity of others - welcome to business, and you'll find that in real life too - but rather that people are stupid enough to assume that since they've been buying ammo in stacks of 1,000 that all stacks are automatically sized at 1,000 and buy things without reading.

I also notice you didn't say a thing about vendor pets, which is the same thing. Do you, by chance, main a hunter? Your blogger profile isn't available.

I can see why people think its unfair with the stack sizes thing, but you have to remember its a game and no rules are being broken. Blizzard could easily fix it if they wanted to, if they don't then people are free to exploit it. And, to be honest, if I fell for something like that I wouldn't be mad at the auction poster, rather I'd be disappointed with myself for being stupid.

@Kirzen: I dislike the ammo thing as well, because when it was first posted it was specifically pointed out that the idea behind it was to intentionally deceive people since the UI made it a bit hard to tell whether the stack consisted of 100 or 1000.

It's one thing to sell something for much more than it would cost at the vendor and another to sell something while hoping that the buyer will mistake it for something else.

The people buying my gems have more money to spend now that they are paying less for gems.

More money, that perhaps they spend on the 100-stacks of ammo, heh. Come on, I don't undercut to defend the free market, sheesh. Talk about being 'full of ideals'. I value playing the game more than I do camping the AH. That's all that stops me.

People who post in stack sizes of 100 at 10x time general cost of ammo are intentionally trying to be deceptive. There is no "innocent" reason someone would do this, and its silly to pretend otherwise.

Now I doubt that a Blizzard GM would take any action on this sort of thing, but they generally frown on it when one player attempts to deceive another.

There's a difference between selling to someone who is not informed (selling a vendor pet at an inflated price at the auctionhouse).

And selling someone something else then he thinks he's getting. That hunter buying the bullets is expecting to buy 1000 bullets, but he's careless and buys out the top cheapest stacks expecting stacks of 1000. But you were smarter and tricked him into buying 100.

The ammo "scam" was pretty common on my server just after 3.1, and then disappeared after a few weeks. Hunters caught on quickly and other engineers found they could move more ammo more quickly by posting in stacks of 1k. Someone has been trying this since last week on my server and as far as I can tell they haven't had many takers.

Well, if it is indeed a scam, take it up with a GM. I believe they take scamming seriously. If people are getting away with a scam because no one reports them then that's because morons are letting them get away with it.

The hunter in the first story does indeed have two garbage specs, but probably wasn't doing 700 dps. Recount and such don't work properly in cross realm groups and doesn't record your party members dps if you're not close enough. Since he was a pally and she was a hunter, that 700 dps was probably just her pet.

I don't see the ammo thing as a scam either, and I'm rather conservative with my views on AH manipulation.

But whether it's ammo or any other item on the AH, it is always buyer beware. If a player is too lazy to check the quantity of the item they're buying (and no, the 100 and 1000 stacks are sufficiently different that it is obvious) then they need to get burned to learn a lesson.

And in the wotlk world where 8g per stack of ammo is merely pocket change, it seems a pretty cheap lesson to boot.

I dont see how the ammo thing is any different from selling heavily overpriced materials on AH that you can buy from a vendor or maybe materials you "need" to level up a profession.

Lets say you put up five arcane crystals on AH for 200g each when they usually sell for 60g each on your realm. Theyre the only arcane crystals on the AH. A new player that is leveling blacksmithing, or whatever, comes along and buys them. He thinks its the normal price for them and that theyre very expensive and rare, he has never heard of sites like wowhead where you can check how much you >should< pay for an item - so he buys them.

If people cant see the difference between "100" and "100...", especially when theyre up on AH at the same time, they deserve to spend some extra money on ammo.

I don't think you'd like seeing another screenshot of 100 stack epic ammo, but I'd just thought I'd comment on how easy it is to make 500% profit off engineers who spent untold hordes of cash on getting those epic patterns.

Gevlon, you're an mean character but you're an amazing busniessman. I respect that. Thank you.